Emily Dickinson on the Individual

Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems champion the importance of the individual over that of the group. She seemed to have had an immense disdain for those who blithely followed the conventions of society with little thought of their own. The reclusive life she preferred for herself was greatly reflected in her works. She disagreed with her family’s views of culture and religion leading her toward transcendental reflections of what she thought to be a better way to connect spiritually to the world. Ms. Dickinson’s poems demonstrate an opinion against the ridiculousness of the achievement of recognition and status, she wrote of the need and the right of the individual to maintain its integrity.

In “I’m Nobody, Who Are You?” perhaps one of Ms. Dickinson’s most famous poems, she bemoans the inclination of most people to want recognition. In the first stanza she warns of the dangers of voicing one’s interest in remaining anonymous, cautioning that one will be ridiculed if “they,” meaning the majority, find out. She mocks those who go around constantly boasting of themselves, vainly attempting to keep their names in popular circulation. She quite cleverly compares them to croaking frogs, ever noisily reminding the world of their existences.

Her poem, “Much Madness is Divinest Sense” further demonstrates her perspectives on society’s intent to squash the individual. The speaker intimates that it is always up to the collective to decide what is sane and what isn’t, “Assent and you are sane, Demur you’re straight way dangerous.” And once they decide you are insane, you will be “Handled with a Chain.” The speaker is not implying that the majority is right all the time, but still, as an individual, you cannot be accepted unless you agree with them. The world can sometimes be so brutal to individuals as to subdue them.

In keeping with her theme of the rights of the individual over the group, Ms. Dickinson’s “Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church” can be viewed as a commentary on how a person should live their spiritual life. Here the speaker asks the reader to consider the transcendental ideal that God “transcends” the physical world and should be experiences by the individual through their experiences with the natural world. It mocks the very idea that God can be experienced in a group setting after all.

In “What Soft Cherubic Creatures” Ms. Dickinson reveals the hypocrisy of the group versus the individual. She exemplifies women, who are expected to put on a made-up “face” for society, yet reveals that upon closer inspection, the “freckled human nature” can be seen. The speaker is commenting on the pressure of society to behave a certain way, while hiding one’s true passions, yet another way the collective subdues the individual. In her article “Writing Poetry Like a Woman” Corinne Blackmer discusses how conventional “feminine verse” of Ms. Dickinson’s era usually touched on domestic topics while Ms. Dickinson “wrote poetry that defied all conventional gendered norms” and “ridiculed the pretensions to virtue and self-righteous piety of these “angelic” creatures. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay entitled Self Reliance said, “It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after one's own. But great is the man who in midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

In “Alone, I Cannot Be” Ms. Dickinson writes in defense of keeping one’s own company. The speaker is telling the reader of the “recordless company” she keeps in her solitude. One can imagine the countless hours the poet spent alone writing her poems. It can be inferred that Ms. Dickinson was plagued by a constant companionship of voices, either imagined or conjured by her creative endeavors. Either way it would seem she is happier for their company, than for that of their warm-blooded counterparts.

In further examining her continued struggle to champion the rights of the individual, it is imperative to examine Ms. Dickinson as an unpublished poet. Her advisor, mentor, and publisher, Thomas Higginson, continually counseled against the publishing of her poems, citing that her poetry would be misrepresented in print form. Ms. Dickinson’s style of writing so defied the conventional forms as to render it nearly impossible to adequately reveal its original intent. She exemplified her feelings about this in the poem, “Fame is a Bee.” Over the course of her lifetime Dickinson maintained control and ownership in order to write, as Sharon Cameron states, "in public while effectively exempting her writing from public legislation" (Cameron, "Amplified Contexts", 241). Writing in this way, perhaps Dickinson felt she was protecting herself against the sting of the bee.